


Test Subject

by sparxwrites



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Exhaustion, Human Experimentation, Hurt/Comfort, Mad Science, Non-Human Rythian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 21:25:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2323691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rythian wakes up to a steady pounding in his head, and manacles around his wrists. Everything’s hazy, blurred around the edges with disorientation and the lingering effects of whatever potion knocked him out, and it takes a second for him to make sense of things. There’s light above him, blindingly white, and when he squints against it he manages to make out the shape of someone above him. He blinks, blinks again, makes out a face haloed in gold against the brightness. It doesn’t really do anything to help with the confusion.</p><p>Goggles resolve themselves from a black smudge, and suddenly everything makes sense. He bares his teeth in a snarl. “<i>Lalna</i>.”</p><p>(In which Rythian's first confrontation with Lalna goes a little differently, and the scientists decides the Enderborn would make a better experiment than a lawn ornament.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Test Subject

Rythian wakes up to a steady pounding in his head, and manacles around his wrists. Everything’s hazy, blurred around the edges with disorientation and the lingering effects of whatever potion knocked him out, and it takes a second for him to make sense of things.

There’s light above him, blindingly white, and when he squints against it he manages to make out the shape of someone above him. They’re fixing the manacle around his right wrist, and they clamp it shut just before he can force his sluggish reflexes to pull his hand away. He blinks, blinks again, makes out a face haloed in gold against the brightness. It doesn’t really do anything to help with the confusion.

Goggles resolve themselves from a black smudge, and suddenly everything makes sense. He bares his teeth in a snarl. “ _Lalna_.”

“Hello, Rythian!” There’s a sharp, vibrating sort of excitement in the scientist’s voice as he lets go of Rythian’s wrist, a wide grin on his lips that slowly fades into focus along with the rest of himself. Rythian drags his wrist away from black-gloved hands, hisses anger and distaste – and then realises, with a bolt of absolute terror, that he can feel the movement of air against his lips, hear the sound of it without the customary distortion having cloth covering his mouth gives it.

His scarf is gone.

He scrambles back from Lalna, drags hands weighed down by shackles up to cover his mouth in horror. It’s too late, he knows. Lalna will have already seen the scars, ropey and shockingly white against the darkness of his skin, fanning out over his lips like the lines of a delta. The hated reminders of how, exactly, he came to be the unnatural, hybridised monstrosity he is.

The thought makes him feel sick, slightly lightheaded.

Of all the people he’d even _consider_ letting see him without his scarf, Lalna is at the bottom of that list. Lower than the bottom.

“Where am I?” he asks instead, sharply, trying to distract himself from the way his stomach is tying itself into panicked knots at the absence of his scarf. The words come out muffled by his fingers, but still distinctly angry. “What’s going on? I was-”

He’d been in the forcefield; he remembers that much, remembers raining destruction down on the ground under him and the damned sphere _still holding._ Remembers Lalna’s mocking laughter, remembers spewing threats and curses at the scientist, and then…

Then he doesn’t remember much of anything.

“What?” says Lalna, sounds almost _disappointed_. “You didn’t think I was going to leave something as _interesting_ as you just laying around in front of my castle, did you? Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve got far more important things to do than use you as a decoration.” He rubs his hands together, grins again – wider this time, a little more deranged. “Although I must admit, you made a very nice lawn ornament.”

Rythian draws in a slow breath, and then another, trying to calm himself. “Give me back my scarf,” he says, and he’s proud of the way his voice is steady, righteously angry, instead of reflecting the shaky, steadily-rising fear that’s strangling his chest.

At that, Lalna _does_ giggle, an unpleasant and almost anxious sound that grates on Rythian’s nerves. “Nope,” he says, shakes his head. “I’m sorry, I had to confiscate it along with all those pretty rings and your other things.” He wiggles his fingers, childish amusement on his face. “Can’t have you magicking your way out of here, can we?”

There’s nothing magical about the scarf. Rythian knows it, and he’s fairly sure Lalna knows it too – fairly sure the scientist is tormenting him for the sake of it.

It’s not an unexpected response, but it still makes his blood boil with anger at the petty cruelty of it. He pushes himself to his feet, hands still over his mouth, and feels a little gratification at the sudden wariness that crosses Lalna’s face, the way the scientist tenses up a little. “It’s not magical, and you know it. Give it back.”

“Nope!” Lalna outright laughs this time, skitters back when Rythian lunges one-handed for him and dances just out of reach of the manacles, pressed up against the door in the doorway. “Sorry Rythian, but I’m the one calling the shots right now. And I say no.”

He pulls a lever by the door, disappears through it and lets it close behind him before Rythian can do more than snarl fury at him, one hand still over his mouth in a slightly hopeless attempt to cover it. Alone in the room, he can do little other than pace up and down the short distance his chains allow, restless like a caged animal, and wait for whatever inventive experiment Lalna has devised to begin.

He doesn’t have to wait long.

A few minutes later there’s a faint whirring from somewhere behind the walls of his prison, and the blueish light he’s come to associate with forcefield generation illuminates the very corners of the room. “Another forcefield?” he asks of the empty room, derision thick in his voice – Lalna will be listening, he’s sure of it, cameras and microphones hidden around the place, the single mirrored wall of his cell most likely one-way glass. “How original.”

He gets no response, not that he’d expected one, only the upping of the whirring to a slightly higher pitch. A shiver ripples across his shoulders, unbidden, and the noise seems to resonate in his bones. Something clenches in the pit of his stomach, and he breathes in like he’s bracing for impact without fully knowing why.

For a second, nothing. And then-

The shock of it draws a yelp from him as the world disintegrates around him, shatters into darkness. Something in the back of his brain, some wild, animal part of him, is howling horror and panic, screaming the need to get away – not from the darkness, but from the forcefield, from the room with its bright lights and its sudden, jarring _wrongness_.

When the world resolves itself, he’s no longer standing but sprawled face-down on the floor, limbs spread out against the cold stone like a pinned butterfly.

He lies there, stunned, trembling, hands fallen from his mouth and his horror at Lalna having seen his mouth all but forgotten in the face of this new threat. “What-” he manages, tasted blood in his mouth and realises he must have bitten his cheek. “What-” The room spins around him, somehow too empty, like all the air’s been sucked out of it – only he’s breathing fine, lungs filling with every shocked inhale.

There’s something wrong, though. Something _missing_. He can feel it, like slick oil over his skin, a creeping sensation of horror that he can’t quite pinpoint.

The world wrenches sideways again, fracturing his train of thought, throwing him into cold darkness that he half-remembers – but it shouldn’t be possible, not without his rings, and Lalna had confiscated them along with his scarf. For all his Ender heritage, even _he_ can’t teleport without the aid of physical focuses for his magic.

He shouldn’t be able to do this, and the knowledge of that echoes wildly in his head even as the attempted teleport fails for the second time and throws him back out world again. This time, he lands several inches above the ground, struggles to get his feet underneath him before he hits the ground and buckles against the wall to soften the impact.

“Turn it off!” he yells, clutching at the chains leading to the manacles around his wrist. The world around him blurs to black yet again, only to be wrenched back into agonising technicolour with a screech he can feel in his _bones_. “Whatever- whatever it is, whatever you’re doing- _god_ , Lalna, just turn it off!” It’s wrong, so wrong, he can taste the wrongness of it in the back of his throat like acid – and if he weren’t so preoccupied he thinks he might have been throwing up.

There’s no response. Whether that’s because Lalna’s not listening any more, or whether it’s because he doesn’t care, is up for debate

 Briefly, Rythian’s entertained by the idea that perhaps something’s gone wrong in whatever control room is behind that one-way glass and Lalna’s unable to respond because he’s lying dead in a pool of his own blood – and then even that is ripped from him as the world closes around him, drags at him with claws, only to release him with a howl of frustration.

He wants to go with it. Gods does he want to go; to be anywhere other than this room with its cold floor and white lights and mirrored wall, anywhere away from the wide, mad eyes of the scientist that he knows must be watching his every twitch.

But he can’t.

Whatever technological abomination Lalna has rigged up is… _interfering_ , somehow. He can feel the lines of his power, usually so clear and strong as they trace through this dimension and into the one known as the End – but they’re blurred, hazy, like oil against his fingers when he tries to reach for them to do _anything_.

Without them, without his rings and his spell books and his alchemical trinkets, he’s powerless. The thought makes bile rise in his throat, even as another broken half-teleport drags him sideways by a few inches, blurring mostly out of existence before splitting like double-vision and solidifying.

It’s not the failed teleports that hurt. They ache, like a stretched muscle, like overexertion and exhaustion and running too fast for too long, but they don’t _hurt_.

What hurts is the way the manacles chafe against the skin of his wrists with every tug, the way his body fails to take account of the chains’ length and lack of give and pulls him up against their limits over and over until his shoulders feel hot and shaky with the abuse.

He suffers it in silence other than the occasional gasp dragged out of him by shock, embarrassed by his earlier outburst and his attempts at begging. He should have known Lalna wouldn’t care; knows the scientist is probably delighted to have provoked such a response for him, is probably laughing about it behind that awful, mirrored wall.

When he looks at it, he can see his own face, the brown of his skin turned greyish with the strain and the jagged scars around his lips turned luminescent and purple as the magic seethes against the constraints of his skin in a desperate bid for freedom.

He tries not to look.

Eventually, he greys out. It’s around the point a particularly strong jolt drags him _past_ the chains’ reach, and his shoulder is pulled from his socket with a wrenching, grinding pop that leaves him gasping for the breath to scream with lungs that no longer seem to work. “Lalna,” he manages, around the taste of blood suddenly in his mouth and the way his vision’s slipping as he sags forward to the ground, pride in shreds and everything crying out for this to _stop_. “Lalna, _please_. Turn it off.”

No response.

Everything goes hazy for a while after that, unfocused and soft around the edges – other than the pain. That stays, razor sharp and flaring with every flicker of the world around him, every time his traitorous, unpredictable body does… whatever it’s doing. Something in his wrist cracks at one point, a high _crunch_ that barely registers other than with the sudden loss of sensation in his fingers where they’re clawed desperately against the stone floor.

He can’t control it, can’t make it stop or even ease the violent energy of it. All he can do is lie there, flinching with every slowly fading pull, and wait – _pray_ – for it to stop. He thinks maybe he starts screaming at some point, until his voice gives out and forces him to whimpering in an animal response that he can no longer control

When he’s on the verge of passing out completely, breath strangling in his throat and every beat of his heart like running a marathon, it stops. _Finally_. For a long second, he can’t quite believe it, every muscle tensed and shaking in preparation for another nauseating _jerk_ , but it never comes.

Sucking in a desperate breath, he lets his eyes slip closed and exhales a sob against the floor.

The forcefield shuts off a minute later with a downward-spiralling hum, sounding almost _disappointed_ , and the last of the fine tremors rippling through Rythian’s body subside a little as whatever the _hell_ had been in the forcefield dissipates.

He sobs again when his magic returns. The connections snap back into focus, solid and gleaming, the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. He grabs for them with a mind fractured with pain, clings to them like a comfort blanket as best he can through the exhaustion and inability to focus.

“That was incredible,” comes Lalna’s voice, finally, breathless with delight and sounding like he’s on the verge of giggling. “ _Incredible_.”

The word grates on Rythian’s ears, but he can’t do anything about it. He’s exhausted enough that he can’t even _move_ , let alone force Lalna to silence; can barely just lie there on the floor and breathe slow and steady against the stone. His entire body feels like one big bruise, shoulder and wrists bright fireworks of pain against the background ache, and when he licks his lips he tastes blood on them.

“No,” he croaks out, voice ragged and broken despite the fact he can barely remember screaming. He’s not quite sure what he’s protesting, only that he _is_ , that he needs to. He forces his eyes open, and tries to move his arms, tries to push himself into a sitting position or at the very least roll over so he’s not staring at the floor and a narrow strip of wall – regrets it almost immediately when every inch of him protests and his shoulder screams unnatural pain.

Feet move into his line of view, black boots and obnoxious neon laces, and he spits bloody saliva at them as best he can between laboured breaths. It falls short, misses, and above him Lalna simply laughs.

“Was that your Ender side or your mage side doing that?” he asks, crouching down and reaching out one gloved hand to nudge Rythian’s head a little so they can make eye contact, apparently unfazed by the hatred written in every line on the other man’s face. “The teleporting thing earlier, I mean – because wow, I was _not_ expecting that.”

He pauses, cocks his head a little and peers thoughtfully at his test subject. “Do you even _know_? Are they the same thing? I’m assuming your Ender side was at least involved, considering it was your connection to the End we were severing, but you seem too _human_ to be able to teleport like _they_ do. I’ve never even seen you try before…”

The words trail off with a sigh at the hatred in Rythian’s eyes and his stubborn silence, born half of anger and half of an inability to find the energy to summon words. “Fine,” he says, carelessly, removes his hand and lets Rythian’s head loll until his face is pressed against the cold stone of the floor again. “Be like that. Y’know, things would go a lot faster and easier if you actually cooperated, but…” He shrugs. “We’ll get answers out of you eventually. You can’t fight progress, Rythian. You can’t fight _science_.”

Rythian tries to argue, to spit out angry words about the dangers and folly of technology. All he can manage is a faintly exhausted, “ _No_ ,” a ragged exhale through gritted teeth that just makes Lalna laugh.

Fingers press against his lips – against the scars there that throb in time to his heart, still glowing purple – and are gone again in an instant, leaving the lingering feeling of rubber. It’s unpleasant, something Rythian longs to try and scrub off, but his arms aren’t cooperating and he doesn’t have the energy to fight with them right now.

Lalna pushes himself out of a crouch and to his feet, wincing a little as his knees protest the motion. “Goodnight, Rythian,” he says, looking down at the man on the floor and sticking his hands into his pockets with an absent-minded sort of air. “Thank you for your help tonight – I’ve got some _fantastic_ data thanks to you, despite your… continued lack of cooperation.” He smiles, giggles a little to himself and turns towards the door. “See you tomorrow morning!”

The lights go out as the door closes behind him. The absence of their harsh brightness is a relief, the lack of Lalna and his inane, insane babbling even more so. Darkness and silence makes his situation a little more bearable, at least, the only sound his own uneven inhalations and exhalations.

He lays there in the darkness, lit only by the Ender-purple glow of his own mouth and eyes, and prays quietly for the pain to knock him out soon.


End file.
